More than 4 IDE devices?

[erath]

This may be a stupid question but is it possible to add an additional hard drive if both the primary and secondary IDE ports are filled on my motherboard? Maxtor is currently offering a free Ultra ATA PCI card if you buy one of their hard drives. If I install this card will it allow me to add a fifth IDE device? There is currently a hard drive, dvd, CD-RW and a zip drive. I would like to add a fast hard drive to do some Digital Video editing but would like to keep all of my current devices.

[Nighthawk]

Most definitely. The limit is two devices per channel. Most motherboards have two channels, so four devices. Controller cards are an additional two channels, so you can hook drives up to them and boom! more IDE devices.

If you want to boot from the new hard drive, you will need to set the BIOS to boot from SCSI.

[erath]

Great, Simple as that? Are there any conflicts. I would assume that there would be some configuration issues. What would the new drive become (primary, secondary etc)?

[NDC]

Yep, that would be the exact thing to do, just add a PCI interface IDE controller card. As a matter of fact, I had a system set up that way with a Soltek EV-1 using an Abit HPT66 controller because all IDE channels were used up. Later I bought an Abit BE6-2 which has four IDE channels to connect up to 8 IDE devices.

Just keep in mind that some controllers seem to cause conflicts with the on-board IDE controller. I ended up returning the first two IDE controllers before I decided to keep the Abit HPT66 controller. I've used the HPT66 controller on various systems and no problems! http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[NDC]

I would assume that there would be some configuration issues. What would the new drive become (primary, secondary etc)?


The PCI interface IDE controller will have its own BIOS for configurations. The same way SCSI cards do....

[erath]

Thanks for the help. I think I'll be back. Im considering building my first PC. Should be interesting!

[justy]

Don't forget to get a meaty power supply, if your lumping lots of devices together.

All the best, Justy.